Aaron Siego of KDE: "It would be very nice if our X server could use OpenGL directly for its display and composition. Because then we could have hardware accelerated effects that are not only cool looking, but also very useful. Well, there is just such a project underway, called XGL. But don't hold your breath. The development of XGL has been largely removed from the community and is being done behind closed doors. Who is this company, you ask, that would take the development of something as potentially important as this out of the community and put it behind closed doors? Novell."

Novell is taking up the development of XGL behing is door? Stop screaming like it was selling it already!

First Novell is surely doing this because it want to work without being disrupted by people asking for dumb fonctionality or to response to decision not to implement some feature.

Novell does this to develop faster and better. Dont forget that they have the ximian guy with them which have strong knowledge of Gnome. And don't rave about KDE/QT, it _WILL_ work too. Novell guys are not dumb. They have been around much more longer than a LOT of other software company. Pleasing a lot of people will get the some favoritism from the community.

At the same time, Novell is doing this as it was said to compete with the Vista graphic system. It is for money, big money. Don't expect Novell to mess with that.

And finaly, why Novell won't give it back? Open source is supposed to be their moto now. Doing so would simply mean they would be so much hatred that they would surely die from an horrible death, the community sending them a big FOAD.

First Novell is surely doing this because it want to work without being disrupted by people asking for dumb fonctionality or to response to decision not to implement some feature.

Well let's all throw the towel in and can the concept of open source software. Microsoft has it right then.

Novell does this to develop faster and better.

Bringing open source projects in-house to hack on is not economically viable.

At the same time, Novell is doing this as it was said to compete with the Vista graphic system.

And they're going to compete with Vista by bringing a very raw project in-house to hack on with two or three developers? Right.........

It is for money, big money.

Oh my God, when will this ever end? The desktop, and any 3D effects on it, accounts for zilch, zero, nada, sweet FA of Novell's revenue. They are merely dorking around with code trying to create their their own corporate desktop in their own little world as they have always done.

The reason why it's important is that it needs to be developed to give Linux desktops a future in their current state and a fighting chance for the future. That can only be achieved in a community, which is what Freedesktop was set up for. Also, X is incredibly important to anyone who runs a graphical environment.

The notion that Novell is going to create the equivalent of the Vista graphics system doing this is going to have the Microsoft fanboys rolling in the aisles.